Dr. Heather Frank is a resident in the combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics program. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Cellular Neuroscience from Colgate University and spent two years as a Post-Baccalaureate Intramural Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Frank went on to earn her MD from Duke University School of Medicine where she spent a year working at the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy. Throughout her medical training she has sought out opportunities to care for Spanish-speaking patients to understand and address their barriers to healthcare. Through the Global Health Scholars’ Program, she will collaborate with local physicians and patient advocates in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia to study interculturality as a determinant of sexual health for adolescent women of Aymara descent. She will be working with Dr. Cecilia Uribe, the medical director of Child Family Health International, Bolivia, who is an expert in socioeconomic determinants of health and healthcare delivery strategies in low-resource setting.

Dr. Nadia Hoekstra is a pediatric pulmonary fellow. Nadia grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina but spent much of her youth in Trinidad and Tobago where her mother’s family lives. Nadia attended Boston College where she graduated with a Master of Arts in Sociology and a minor in Hispanic Studies. Following her undergraduate studies Nadia spent two years at the Yale School of Medicine conducting translational research on the mechanisms of acute diarrheal illness, a leading cause of childhood death worldwide. She then went on to graduate from medical school at the University of North Carolina in 2018 with a concentration in Medical Education. Following medical school, Nadia completed pediatric residency at the University of Colorado where she was a member of the Pediatric Residency Global Health Track and a Co-Leader of the Diversity in Pediatrics Committee. During residency Nadia conducted research on screening practices for pediatric latent tuberculosis and completed a clinical rotation at a large referral hospital in Lilongwe, Malawi. Her clinical experience in Malawi influenced her to pursue research on childhood pneumonia in Malawi. During her pulmonary training at UNC, Nadia will spend one year in Malawi where she will conduct clinical research on severe pneumonia in infants as a NIH Fogarty Fellow. Nadia plans to pursue an academic career with a focus on improving the health of children with respiratory disease in the United States and globally, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa.